Since the time of the Romantics, it has been a common practice to seek beauty in the sublime (the awe and majesty of an environment), and these notions in contemporary art are still omnipresent, according to Cramer ‘technological may arbitrarily take the place of Kant’s natural beauty…we are no longer overwhelmed by mountain ranges or thunderstorms, but for example by the pervasiveness of computing (2013, p.119)’. On the other hand programmers who practice and are informed by the languages of
information technology are only rarely connected to contemporary art or artists, and in most cases aesthetic concerns are seen as an anathema.77In their discussion of
75 For instance, this subculture shows many of their favourite codes via t-shirts fashion featuring witty idioms as witnessed here on the ThinkGeek Merchandise site, viewed 18 December 2013,
<http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/5d6a/>.
76 As represented in L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel and MGM's 1939 motion picture Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland.
77 See Appendix 7.4 for an example of an email, displaying a challenged computer science perspective of playful experiential prototyping models.
‘interface aesthetics’, Andersen and Pold equate the sublime with navigating the depths below the visual surface:
…we need to get past the classic Kantian dichotomy of the beautiful versus the sublime. Digital artistic practice has often been biased towards the latter, but we need to address all the dimensions of interfaces and not stay on the visual surface (2011, p. 13).
In relation to people who unmask the ‘visual tricks and those who perpetuate image- mongering’, Barbara Maria Stafford discusses this historical conundrum between the black box duping apparatus and specious expertise:
This coexistence of competing, technically inflected visual environments and rituals…optical instruments as devices - in the double sense of duping
apparatus and specious expertise - is still with us today. Perhaps it is nowhere more evident than with the new digital magoi who alone can go below or above the interface to achieve the experience of “real presence” with the codes, i.e., be in direct contact with code (2008, p. 148).
At the same time, Stafford locates the ‘new digital magoi’ and proposes that their
practices may mediate even further these distinct, but co-constituting oppositions. It is commonly assumed that the Reformation valued the authority of the word over a culture of showing.78 Stafford (2008) recognises those who know how to go above and below the interface (or code) as ‘digital magoi’ who might mediate or heal this fracture or ghettoized knowledge area.
This situation is changing; one could say the first Maker Faire (2005) in San Francisco was a moment of explicit self-recognition. For the popular growth of the ‘maker’ culture, this may have acted to crystallise issues, especially in regard to the enthusiasm for a Hacker/DIY aesthetic. But perhaps this does not really mark a starting point for that community, especially considering that a decade prior, several large-scale popular computer subculture festivals and hacker meet-ups occurred in Europe and in the USA. Examples include the first Hackers Conference in California (1984), the first Computer Chaos Club Congress in Germany (1984), Summercon held in St Louis, Missouri
78 Semiotician Umberto Eco (1994) wrote a playful article on this very topic in his column of an Italian newsweekly.
(1987), and the first Galactic Hacker Party (1989) presented by a not-for-profit
organization that holds a quadrennial Dutch hacker convention ever since.79 The latter is a weeklong camping carnival where formal presentations and hands-on learning workshops take place; it is largely attended by an international community of hackers and security experts and has been a large informant upon the perspective of this research.
Access to the pedagogy of programming has become freely available for those who would usually not even consider (or otherwise have the ability) to complete a
traditional Computer Science education. Universities such as Harvard and Stanford teach free online courses in computer programming, which in turn has engendered an invigorated attitude to experiential art making and related computer sub-cultures.80 The methodologies of experiential prototyping that these communities adopt is described and elaborated upon in Chapter 3. What also needs mentioning here are
older avant-garde movements such as Dada, Political Cabaret, Mail Art, Fluxus, Squat Theatre, Situationism, Anti-Theatre and Experimental Theatre, all of which form yet another historical pretext and some of which will be depicted in this chapter.
Sites of convergence and congregation still operate for artists who engage with
emergent art forms and contemporary digital culture, and who consider the pedagogy of technological democratization as still rare within the contemporary art field.
Pointing out this blind spot, Florian Cramer writes:
…[the] aesthetic, Pythagorean beauty ideals that governed computer science from Knuth to fractal geometry, the ‘art and beauty’ of the white hat hacker culture described by Steven Levy, and the human/computer interface designs of mainstream, high tech media lab arts…this dialectics helped to stabilize and reinforce ‘media art’ as a separate art system based, with a few exceptions, on pre-modernist aesthetic parameters. The contemporary (visual) art system is,
79 There is also Homebrew D.I.Y computer history influenced by the 1974 Ted Nelson book Computer Lib that is considered the first book about the personal computer (which was eventually packaged with Dream Machines, another book by the same author).
80 See online free courses that were originally spearhead by MIT and Processing in the dissemination of programming skills, such as Harvard University ‘Introduction to Computer Science’ viewed October 20 2013, <https://www.edx.org/course/harvardx/harvardx-cs50x-introduction-computer-1022 http://code.org>, Standford CS101, viewed October 20 2013, <https://www.coursera.org/course/cs101>, which provides access to basic commuter science for a zero-prior-experience audience. This is part of a broader Open access movement, viewed October 20 2013, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Access>.
unlike electronic art, music or film, no longer defined by a medium or occupation with media, but first of all by its own system (2013, p. 117).
For the connection between artists, programmers, and the ‘new digital magoi’ (Stafford 2008) to occur, a framing and contextualisation must take place for these distinct knowledge domains to be able to interface. An example of such is the post-digital performance event initiated and curated by myself, the researcher. This event, called ‘Networked Art Forms and Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits (NAF:TMFC)’ showcased artists, programmers and thinkers (whose work responds to the emergent conditions of a networked world, a realm increasingly transmitted through fiber and code) who came together in Hobart, Australia. Presented at Contemporary Art Tasmania, on radio and on the Internet, the event was comprised of a series of events inspired by computer culture. It was described as a ‘technological coven disguised as an art project’ by a local Hobart street press arts reviewer. 81 Another summary by a
contemporary art reviewer who attended NAF:TMFC concluded ‘Initially I really felt that the aspiration for accessibility and empowerment wasn't available to me and I would still argue that many will be locked out by the cult-like feel of the event’ (Abel, 2013). On the contrary, in actuality the project was well attended (being the most visited gallery event of the year)82and considered a success by the local participants because of ease-of-accessibility and ready induction into the mysterious world of computer subcultures. The local attendees participated fully in the programme of events that spanned the entire month of June 2013.83 According to Lewis, ‘all positions have political consequences’; in order to inevitably escape the confinement of
disciplines within received genres and taxonomies, there will always be a need for events that open up inaccessible fields (and the desired acknowledgment of such). Lewis highlights the ‘continuing struggle over generic and general categories, with full understanding that all positions have political consequences.’ (1995, p. 224). Hence, the central motivation for this NAF:TMFC event (and also this study) is to present and survey emergent contemporary art practices, especially those that endeavor to expand technical disciplines from the confinement of the received sub-genres of art.
81 Overview of NAF:TMFC, 2013, WARP Magazine April 2013, p. 15.
82 Correspondence with the communications and marketing personnel at Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hewitt, S 2014, email 15 January 2014, <[email protected] >.
83 For a full rundown of events, performances, presentations, workshop documentation and participant reports please see Network Networked Art Forms and Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits (NAF:TMFC) viewed 15 January 2014, <http://tacticalmagick.net>, Also see Appendix 7.3 for promotion material including the programme and concept outline.
For example, there is an array of related sub-genres of art constructed from, or existing alongside, the medium of performance and software, such as: contemporary performance, experimental theatre, post-dramatic theatre, live art, software art, code art, generative art, mail art, digital art, computer art, game art, interactive art, new media, electronic art, telematic art, and algorithmic art.
This discussion will be limited to some of these fields in relation to contemporary art and the performing arts, where it is acknowledged that the category of ‘art’ and ‘theatre’ has expanded to include ‘performance’ and subsequently ‘postdramatic theatre’. These analytical categories allow the inclusion and examination of a larger cultural paradigm than the terms ‘theatre’, ‘dance’, ‘cabaret’, ‘live art’, ‘performance art’, ‘contemporary art’, ‘fine art’, or even ‘ritual’ permit. Performance also has many meanings; for example, it can refer to acting out in everyday life.